Are You a Social Media Star? Accenture Is Looking for You.

“Social recruiting” is a popular hiring buzzword these days, and employers from Wall Street to Washington have stepped up their recruiting presence on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in search of entry-level and experienced talent.

The consulting giant Accenture PLC —which has about 275,000 employees and aims to hire 50,000 in fiscal 2014—is going several steps further and recruiting candidates based in part on their activity and influence on social sites.

Some recruiters are lurking on industry-specific LinkedIn group pages such as Digital Marketing and SAP Community, tracking active commenters and conversation-starters in areas as diverse as medicine, mortgage processing and mathematics. They’re exploring how to uncover talent using Facebook Graph searches, which run complex requests such as “engineers who speak Swahili.” And, they’re checking to see whether a prospect has strong online connections to current or former Accenture employees.

People who direct online conversations prove themselves as leaders in their fields of expertise, says John Campagnino, managing director of global talent acquisition, and that makes them particularly credible as consultants. (Hiring people with strong followings doesn’t hurt business development, either.)

The company is looking for people who can work through technical or strategy problems at major companies, but who would also garner a high Klout score, which measures a person’s social media influence based on their Twitter and Facebook activity, Mr. Campagnino says. There’s no official formula to assess a candidate’s talent and influence, the company says, but it’s a framework for recruiters to keep in mind.